


Better Days

by wanttobeatree



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mizumono Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1692986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will tries to reverse time. (Five ways the teacup might have come together.) Post-finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better Days

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sharon Van Etten's _[Your Love is Killing Me](http://frightfullytreeish.tumblr.com/post/86674858915/hannibal-screaming-continues)_ , which I was basically listening to on repeat whilst I wrote this.

Will wakes with a mask over his face; with a cottony tongue and a cloudy mind and the distant, muted throb of the promise of later pain; with cool fingers on his skin. 

“Can you hear me, Mr Graham?” a soft voice says.

He nods. The doctor eases the oxygen mask away from his face.

“Where’s Chilton?” he croaks, and then he shakes his head. He squints in the bright light. He remembers dark shapes moving in shadow, a red wave washing over him, Hannibal’s hand on his face. He can still taste blood.

“You’re in the hospital, Mr Graham,” the doctor says. “You’re in federal custody. Do you remember what happened?”

“I do,” he whispers.

He can taste Abigail’s blood.

 

*

 

This time, he doesn’t run from the feds. He can see that the game is up. He can see no way now, with their back-up pulled and their support crumbling and Jack tail-spinning in his fury, for this to end in anything other than carnage. He should just stop fighting. He holds his hands up, lets the shouting crash down around him.

They press his face to the floor. They find the meat in the freezer. Will holds his hands behind his back and the handcuffs slide onto his wrists. 

Kade Purnell leans down over him and says, “This has gone on far enough. We will get a search warrant. We will _investigate_ Hannibal Lecter.”

Will says, “Well, you’d better move fast.”

Later, his lawyer gets him a copy of The Baltimore Sun. Will learns the full details through Freddie’s article: how the SWAT team didn’t move fast enough to apprehend ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’. There was a shoot-out. It was chaos. The ambulance arrived too late to save either Crawford or Dr Bloom, who had fallen in the struggle. Freddie the phoenix, risen from the ashes just in time to become the world’s most sought after expert on the Lecter and Graham cases, reports with breathless excitement on the recent traces of Abigail Hobbs’ DNA found in the basement.

Later still, after the FBI has distanced itself from everything Will ever did – after Will has been thoroughly discredited, when he can no longer teach, can no longer meet his own eyes in the mirror, when even the lurid manhunt for Hannibal the Cannibal has drifted from the headline news –

Later still, when he’s down in Florida fixing boat motors, he gets the postcard. He recognises her handwriting. He had been waiting.

Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

He always knew they would come back for him.

 

*

 

Will can almost walk again. He hobbles up and down the corridor. Every movement tugs at his stitches, white pain lancing out from the gash like branches from the trunk of a tree. A little piece of Hannibal to carry around with him always. A parting gift.

Jack is still in intensive care. Bella has moved into a hospice. Alana might not walk again. They all missed Abigail’s funeral.

“I think he wanted me to survive it,” he says to Alana, who wheels silently alongside him.

She makes a small, pained sound.

“I saw him snap Mason Verger’s neck with such precision it left him paralysed but still breathing. It takes skill. There’s art in the brutality.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this.”

They stop at the end of the corridor. Will is breathless. He sits down in a plastic chair and holds his hand over his stitches. They feel hot. He has been branded. A bright point of pain in the numbness of his mind and body. Alana angles her wheelchair so she is facing the window, her head turned away from Will’s gaze.

“He wanted me to survive,” Will says again.

“I mean it, Will. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“He could have killed me easily. He wanted me to see her die, but then he could have slit my throat afterwards. He could have left us both like that, bleeding out a great ocean of blood together on the kitchen floor.”

“Stop it,” she snaps.

“He’ll be following all the news, you know,” he breathes. “He’ll know by now that we’ve both pulled through.”

Alana groans. She doubles over slowly, as if in terrible pain, and she buries her head in her hands.

“Stop,” she says “Please, stop. You’re obsessing, Will. It isn’t healthy. I don’t want to listen to this.”

Her fingers clutch and twist in her hair. Her shoulders heave. Will reaches out a hand and touches her arm, but she jerks herself away from his fingers.

“What if he comes back?” she says. “What if he–” 

She motions at her wheelchair, her hands shaking. Tears drip down her face into her lap. Will watches them fall.

“I can’t run away,” she chokes out.

“He wouldn’t come after you,” Will says. He brushes his hand down her arm and this time she lets him. She grabs hold of his fingers and holds them tight. “He’d–”

“I know.” She laughs bleakly. “I know. I’m not that important to him.”

Her hand trembles in Will’s grip.

“I think he wanted me to live with what I’ve done,” he murmurs.

Alana drops his hand, turning her head away again. Spring is here at last, everything bright and green, and the sunlight through the window shines onto her face. Neither of them has been outside yet. There are armed guards on their ward and paparazzi blocking the exits.

Will plucks at the edge of his dressing. He stares down at his hand. He had gripped Hannibal’s shoulder tightly with this hand. They had both been changed by it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

 

*

 

This time, Will looks closer at Hannibal’s face. It is a test, of course, when Hannibal offers him the chance to leave tonight. To pack his bags and feed his dogs and flit away without a backwards glance at the spectre of carnage hanging on the horizon.

It could be painless

Will looks closer at Hannibal’s face. He looks past the facade that he is testing Will for cold feet, for cracks in his composure, to see how seriously he wants Jack dead. This time he can see the darker secret. A shadow in Hannibal’s eyes, perhaps. He sees there is no other way that this can go.

He says, “Okay, let’s do it,” and he watches Hannibal’s face slide out of darkness and into a smile, like storm clouds parting for the sunlight.

He tells himself he will be able to contact Jack. He will be able to get out of this.

Later, he clutches Abigail to him, her hands twisted tightly in the front of his shirt. His breath is twisted in his throat. Hannibal watches them indulgently, like a god smiling down on his creation.

Later still, he watches news of the international manhunt for Lecter and Graham from a villa in Italy. He has been charged with Randall Tier’s murder and the truth has come out about all Hannibal’s crimes. The FBI is under intense scrutiny. Jack’s worn face flashes across the screen.

Next to him, Abigail shivers, changing the channel. She rubs the space where her ear had been and Will’s stomach turns. He remembers the taste of it.

He tells himself he will get them both out of this alive.

 

*

 

There is a photo of Will on the front page of the newspaper on Kade Purnell’s desk. He can’t tear his eyes away from the sight of it; of the tubes in his body and the vivid gash on his stomach, so much bigger than it seems in the mirror. Freddie Lounds’ handiwork is everywhere he turns, triumphant in her return from the grave. She has written about Abigail, but every single publication has written about Abigail now. Will doesn’t have it in him to hold a grudge against her anymore. Whatever it is he has left in him, there isn’t enough of it for that.

He thinks some vital part of him slid out alongside Hannibal’s knife.

“Like it or not,” Purnell is saying, “you are our leading expert on Hannibal Lecter. You knew him better than anyone.”

“Know,” Will murmurs. “Not knew. He isn’t dead yet.”

Purnell narrows her eyes at him, her knuckles resting on the top of her desk. Will’s gaze drifts back down to the photo on the front page. There is another picture of him and Hannibal next to it, at a crime scene, leaning in close to confer. He remembers the day: a rainstorm the night before, damp red leaves sticking to their shoes. Hannibal brought stew with him for their lunch. He visited Abigail the next day. If he could go back to that moment.

Purnell pulls the newspaper out from under his gaze. She unfolds it and frowns down at the photos and the headline, ‘Graham Not Guilty.’

“Ms Lounds seems to be on your side, at least.”

“She owed me one. Got her the story of a lifetime, didn’t I?”

Purnell drops the paper back down onto her desk. “If you help us track down Lecter, it will help your case. You know that. You’ve done this before.”

Will looks down at his hands. He marvels at the things he has done with these hands. Broken open the skin on Randall Tier. Held together the skin on Abigail’s neck.

“His sister was on his mind a lot lately,” he says, at last. “He might have gone somewhere that reminds him of her.”

Purnell’s eyebrows lift. She flicks through a file, shaking her head and pursing her lips. “Sister? There’s nothing about a sister...”

“Mischa,” Will breathes. “She died. I think Abigail reminded him of her.”

“And that’s why he killed her?”

He shakes his head. He looks down at the paper again: him, wrapped in tubes and bandages like a cocoon. Him, side by side with Hannibal in deep conversation. The red leaves hanging over their heads like a promise of the bloodshed yet to come.

If he could just go back to that moment. If he could just plunge his hands into the open artery of the past and twist his hands in tight until the paramedics arrive.

“That’s why he let her live,” he says. “There was a place in his world for her.”

“He cared for her?”

Will shrugs.

“He has passions and rages. Whatever it is he feels, he feels it deeply.”

“And what did he feel for you?”

 

*

 

This time, when Hannibal calls Abigail to his side, he hands her the knife. Abigail is shaking her head and stammering ‘no’, but he curls her fingers around the handle.

“You can do it,” he says. “Just like you did it before.”

Will’s vision is wavering, his hands twisting and clenching in his shirt, slippery with blood. He can feel the stag just over his shoulder, its hot breath on his cold skin. Abigail staggers forwards and kneels down in front of him. Her hands hover helplessly over his stomach. She is panting for breath.

“It’s okay,” Will whispers. “It’s okay.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t – He’ll kill me if I don’t. I have to. I’m sorry, Will, I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

He is shaking harder than she is, choking for breath, but his mind is distant from his body. Blood around him like red leaves. He hopes spring comes soon. With the hand not pressed so tightly over his gut, he grabs her fingers.

“Survive this, okay? You - get out alive.”

Abigail nods. Her eyes are wide and filling with tears, but alive. Behind her, Hannibal stirs.

“Pull his head back,” he says.

Sobbing, Abigail slides her fingers into Will’s hair. She tilts his head back, exposing his neck. When he meets Hannibal’s gaze over her shoulder, he relaxes. A calmness settles over his body. The beast’s breath slows to a halt.

Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

“Promise me,” he mumbles.

Hannibal inclines his head. Somewhere far away, Abigail too is nodding, trembling, holding the knife to his throat. Her fingers stroke his hair. He doesn’t feel any pain.

There are footsteps, and then there is silence, and then shouting and bright flashing lights.

Later, Will closes his eyes.

 

*

 

“It’s not uncommon to re-imagine all the ways you wish things had gone differently, after a traumatic experience. And it’s hardly surprising with an imagination as strong as yours, but you can’t live in these thoughts, Will. You have to be present for what is happening now, instead of bargaining for what might have been.”

“You think I’m in denial?”

“I think you’re struggling to come terms with everything that’s happened to you.”

Will rubs his knuckles on the arm of his chair. Doctor Morales watches him with a calm expression. Her office is small and unimposing, awash in neutral colours and soft furnishings, with a couple pot plants by the window. A watercolour beach scene hangs on the wall next to her diplomas.

“I’m struggling to... connect,” he says.

She waits patiently for him to continue.

“I’m not exactly a – social butterfly. I don’t have any friends outside of work. Everyone I know was involved in this. It’s surreal to go to the grocery store and pass by all these people who never came into contact with this... this _poison._ They walk in light and air somehow. I’m wading through thick blackness.”

“Do you ever talk to your friends about him?”

“Jack’s weighed down by it all. He’s still under investigation. Alana... has closed herself off from me. She’s angry at herself for not seeing clearly sooner. She’ll never admit it, but she’s angry at me, too, for not _making_ her see.”

Doctor Morales watches him. Will rubs his knuckles back and forth on the arm of his chair. Soft, beige fabric. Everything so gentle and welcoming.

“No,” he adds, when she doesn’t speak. “I don’t talk to them about him.”

“You don’t talk to me about him either.”

“I’m struggling to connect with you.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Well, I had a difficult relationship with my last psychiatrist.”

He chuckles to himself; the sound of it is alien in his own ears. His hand throbs and he looks down to see he has knocked a scab from his knuckles. There is a speck of bright red blood on the beige armchair.

“He violated you,” Doctor Morales says. “He betrayed your trust in every conceivable way. It’s understandable to feel wary now.”

Will shrugs. He sucks the little cut on his hand until it stings. In his mind’s eye, the speck of blood spreads and bubbles and swells. It drips onto the floor. Yes, a vast red sea, gushing out of the cracks in all the gentle furnishings and neutral colours. Drown it all in an ocean of blood. It rises to his chin. It’s difficult to breathe. The scent is overpowering. Doctor Morales watches him calmly from her seat even as the red tide licks her chin, fills her nose and ears, closes over her head and envelops her.

“Would you like a referral?” she says, her voice coming out clearly through the blood.

Will shakes his head until it drains away from his vision.

“Purnell assigned you to me. Might as well... make a go of it.”

He smiles flatly at her and she smiles back.

“I think it would help you, Will, if you talked about what happened. I can only help you so much, otherwise. When he’s caught, you know you’ll be a witness - don’t let that be the first time you share your experience.”

“There isn’t much to tell.”

He lifts his hand to his mouth again. He can still smell it all around him. His and Abigail’s blood, all over the kitchen floor.

“He betrayed me, I betrayed him,” he says. “Even Stevens.”

 

*

 

This time, when Hannibal holds him close, Will has the presence of mind to reach for the knife. He wrests it from Hannibal’s grip, slippery with his own blood. Hannibal gasps and his fingers clench in Will’s hair when Will forces the knife back into his body. Abigail wails from somewhere far away.

Hannibal’s head lolls forwards onto Will’s shoulder. The weight of Hannibal’s falling body forces the knife deeper inside and they sink down to the floor together. Blood gushes out over Will’s hands. Hannibal draws in a laboured breath against his ear, his fingers tightening in Will’s hair.

“What do I do, Will?” Abigail cries. “Hannibal, I – what do I do?”

She kneels down beside them, her hands hovering helplessly over them. She’s panting for breath. The stag wavers over her shoulder.

“Survive,” Will chokes out. “You – survive. Get... get out of here alive.”

They are lying on the floor. He realises he’s shaking. Hannibal grabs hold of his wrist with clammy, blood-drenched fingers and forces the knife back out of his body. He chokes and gurgles and another fresh, hot wave flows out between them, but he drags Will’s hand jerkily up, up to their throats. Blood bubbles at his lips. His fingers stroke Will’s hair even as he tugs his head back, exposing the throat.

“I gave you – a gift,” he hisses. There is blood on his teeth. “You didn’t want it.”

“Told you,” Will whispers, chest heaving. He grabs hold of Hannibal’s fingers, around the handle of the knife. “Unsustainable. Was always going to, to end this way.”

Hannibal smiles. With the knife at Will’s throat, he shudders and goes still. His eyes are open. Will stares into them. He can’t move. He can feel the stag’s breath on the back of his neck, hot gusts of air on his cold skin. Hannibal’s fingers in his hair.

Somewhere far away, Abigail is sobbing.

Later, their blood mingles together, a great ocean on the kitchen floor.

 

*

 

Newspapers cover Jack’s coffee table, local and national and international. A dozen paper copies of Will’s and Hannibal’s faces stare back up at him. Sightings and hoaxes, opinion pieces and detailed reports. In the background, CNN plays on the television, the volume turned down low.

“How’s Bella?”

“She’s... managing. Still furious with me for almost dying before her.” Jack smiles flatly up at him. “Says I have to wait my turn.”

Will chuckles. He lowers himself carefully down onto the couch, holding onto his stomach, his hand pressed over the tender ridge of scar tissue. He can see the puckered gash on Jack’s neck. He still talks softly and a little hoarsely.

“How’s Purnell?” Jack asks.

“Efficient.”

“I hear you’re invaluable.”

“I think they’ll drop the charges if I catch him.”

“Not if,” Jack says. “When.”

On the television screen, the talking heads discuss another hoax sighting in Berlin. The manhunt for Hannibal the Cannibal has gripped the world. Will runs his fingers over his scar. Jack clears his throat. 

“What do you think?”

“He’ll be somewhere cultured,” Will says. “He thinks he’s assumed a new identity, but he’ll never give up his luxuries. Fine food, wine, opera, art. Somewhere with beautiful architecture, too. Probably somewhere he... mentioned to me. A private joke.”

“You think?” Jack sounds incredulous.

Will’s lips twitch. “He is - relishing his role as the betrayed. Every smarting nerve, every tender heartache. His feelings might be real, but he savours the theatricality. It’s a performance.”

“And he took Ms du Maurier for a readymade audience?”

“Perhaps.” Will shrugs. He presses his palm flat over his scar. It still feels hot.

“Or loneliness,” he says.

Jack makes a soft sound of derision and they lapse into silence. Sifting through the papers on the coffee table, Will pulls out one open on a page with Abigail’s smiling face, before she ever met him, before her life was torn asunder and drenched in blood. The article mourns the loss of her young life; it accuses the FBI of failing her.

“I don’t know what else we could have done,” Jack says. “I keep thinking it over, different plans, different angles. It always ends bloody.”

“I’ve found myself... reversing time again and again. I travel in my mind down different paths. The decisions unmade, the words unsaid. The cascade of one million single moments that led us to her death.”

“I know.”

“She was right here all along, Jack.” Staring down at the paper in his hand, Will smoothes a crease out of her face. He never saw her smile that wide. “When Hannibal and I were whispering dark secrets into each other’s ears, she was the darkest secret. Perhaps she heard our footsteps. Recognised the distant timbre of my voice.”

“I know,” Jack says again, expression wretched.

“He killed her,” Will whispers, “to punish me.”

He runs his fingers over the photograph. If he could go back to that moment and warn her what was coming. Him and Hannibal both, tearing her apart.

“You can’t blame yourself-”

“He’s going to come back.”

Jack falters. “That would be suicide. Every airport in the world is watching for him.”

“He’s coming back,” Will says.

 

*

 

This time, Will throws his hands up fast.

“Wait,” he shouts. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just – wait.”

Hannibal regards him coolly. Will can see the glint of the knife in his hand. He can hear Abigail’s panicked breathing behind him.

“I want to come with you,” he says.

Hannibal cocks his head. He is covered in Jack’s blood. He says, “You betrayed me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“Until now?”

“Until now.”

Moving slowly, he lowers his gun to the floor and kicks it out of sight. He straightens up to stand in front of Abigail. He can feel her breath on the back of his neck, gusting hotly over his cold skin. Hannibal studies them both with glittering eyes.

“Prove it,” he says at last. “Prove your loyalty.”

Will swallows. Abigail’s fingers clutch at his wrist, twisting tightly into his shirt sleeve. Her cheek pressed against his shoulder. He can feel her shivering.

“How?”

Hanibal cocks his head towards the pantry door. The dark puddle of blood is spreading across the floor.

“Jack is still alive. Show him whose side you are on.”

He holds out the knife.

“Will,” Abigail says, her voice muffled in his shirt. She holds onto him tightly.

“It’s okay,” Will whispers. “It’s okay.”

He extricates himself from her grip and steps forwards. Hannibal smiles at him, like storm clouds parting for the sunlight. Will takes the knife. He tells himself he will get Abigail out of this alive.

Later, Hannibal smoothes the palm of his hand down the side of Will’s bloody face. He cups his cheek. He strokes his hair. Abigail, tucked in tightly at their side, is still shaking. Her eyes are wide and filling with tears, but alive.

Will’s hands are slippery with blood. Redder than autumn leaves. He hopes spring comes soon.

Somehow, he always knew it would end this way.

 

*

 

Will wades through the blackness.

When he’s not in Purnell’s office, he is kept in a safe house. He walks the dogs with an armed escort. People in the street don’t often turn to look at him. The public knows his scars better than they know his face. His guards watch over him with wary eyes. He suspects even they don’t know if they have been ordered to protect him from Hannibal or to keep Will from running to him. 

In the bathroom with the door that does not lock, Will lifts his shirt and studies his scar. It snakes around his belly like a question mark. A little piece of Hannibal to carry with him always.

On the radio drifting through from the lounge, he hears about a credible sighting of Hannibal the Cannibal in Palermo. He fixes himself a cup of coffee, with the dogs milling nervously around his feet. The year has been hard on them too. His guard at the kitchen table pats every dog that passes by his chair. 

Will rinses his mouth out with coffee. He washes the lingering taste of Abigail’s blood away. Leaning against the edge of the sink, he listens to the radio.

In his mind’s eye, he can see Hannibal walking through that Norman chapel. He lingers in the foyer and Will walks up to stand beside him. Together they study the skull on the floor. As if either of them needs a reminder of mortality. Hannibal smiles like a man with a darker secret. Will brushes his fingers over his scar.

“Call Purnell,” he says, coming back to himself. “Tell her to get in touch with the Italian police. Lecter went to a chapel in Palermo. He might have left us some kind of message.”

The guy freezes, his hands in Winston’s fur, and then he snaps back into motion and leaps to his feet. He leaves Will alone in the kitchen. Listening to the muffled sounds of the phone conversation, Will turns to the window. Summer is here now, everything golden and green; the sunlight shines onto his face.

Will looks down at the cup in his hands. Four thousand miles away, he feels Hannibal do the same.

He lets it drop.

He waits for the pieces to come back together.


End file.
